


Pros & Cons

by Nebulad



Series: Whiskey Molotov [18]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Existential Crisis, F/M, Family, Far Harbour DLC Spoilers, Friendship, Gen, Where You Belong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-07-11 12:03:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7050088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nebulad/pseuds/Nebulad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Audrey pulled the trigger and the mirelurk fell back into the ocean before the turrets could turn their clunky heads to see it. Somewhere off to the west she could hear Shaun, Cait, and Longfellow messing around with an old terminal the kid wanted to take apart, and Deacon had wanted to stay at Acadia for a while longer. He was suspicious, the sky was blue, and water was still wet. With all of them accounted for, that left…</p><p>“All right Sunshine, I was gunna let you work it out by yourself but that was two hours ago,” Hancock announced, scrambling up on the roof of the cabin beside her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pros & Cons

Longfellow’s roof had a beautiful view of the ocean, and as a natural consequence of such choice real estate, a mirelurk problem. He said it was manageable as far as problems went— good for a bit of sharpshooting, see if you could beat the turrets to snapping their shells— and as it turned on the third hour of her vigil, Audrey had to agree. She wasn’t happy about it at the moment, but she really didn’t need to worry about Shaun running around on the property while she dealt with the island’s mess.

Inhale.

Hold it a few seconds.

Keep it steady.

_Snap._

She pulled the trigger and the mirelurk fell back into the ocean before the turrets could turn their clunky heads to see it. Somewhere off to the west she could hear Shaun, Cait, and Longfellow messing around with an old terminal the kid wanted to take apart, and Deacon had wanted to stay at Acadia for a while longer. He was suspicious, the sky was blue, and water was still wet. With all of them accounted for, that left…

“All right Sunshine, I was gunna let you work it out by yourself but that was two hours ago,” Hancock announced, scrambling up on the roof of the cabin beside her. She put down her gun but didn’t turn to look at him. He’d been the only one in the room who’d heard DiMa— worse, he’d been the one to hear her flustered responses to the synth’s frankly invasive questions. So what if she dreamt of white rooms? What business was it of his if she couldn’t remember what grade school she’d gone to, or if she felt weirdly alone and out of place? “What’s goin’ on in your head?” he asked, shuffling a little closer.

“You think I’m a synth?” she asked. He shrugged.

“Didn’t think it mattered all that much. You never seemed to have a problem with it before.” It was _different_ before, and she wasn’t deep enough in denial to try and tell herself that it wasn’t different because it was _her._ It _was_ fucked up, and while she could offer a world of advice to someone like Danse trying to come to terms with the sudden vertigo-inducing tilt of his entire life… well, she fucking knew that she didn’t know shit. _You just have to build up from here_ sounded stupid as hell when you were caught looking at what came before.

“It’s not that I have a problem with synths all the sudden,” she argued. A mirelurk rose and with a snap of her rifle, it fell again. Deacon wasn’t around to make a Old West joke, so the hip-draw was lost. “If we’re gunna start at the top of the problems list, let’s go with: me being a synth would mean that some fucked up old guy recreated a synthetic version of his presumably dead mother, programmed her, and then released her into the wasteland as an experiment. That’s fucking creepy, and that would be the story of my whole life.” She sort of snapped it, and struggled to calm herself down. She didn’t want to seem like she was riled up, despite the three hours she’d been sitting guard.

“Not your _whole_ life,” he reminded her.

“A truly inspiring start.” The next bit would be harder to choke out, but she would do it because she was totally calm and unaffected by DiMa’s hyper-sensitive synth radar. “And then… what. So this creepy guy makes me because he’s obsessed with his mom, and… I’m not her. I wasn’t a hacker, I never lived in Canada— fuck, I never lived in Boston— and… Nate didn’t get me Codsworth for my birthday. I was never married to him.” A mirelurk at that moment would have been nice, so of course nothing bothered to rear its ugly head. It was just her and the ghost of the guy she… would really miss being married to, and her boyfriend.

Hancock was quiet for a few minutes, then shrugged. “I don’t know what to say. Put the gun down.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re freaking me out, Drey. Put the gun down and let’s have this talk somewhere with less of a vantage point. Let the turrets take over.” She watched him for a second, not wanting to move. There were a handful of mirelurks that needed shooting, and they needed to be shot by her because that’s what she was good at. Great vision, steady hands. A controlled experiment with a biased overseer.

“What if I was replaced _after_ I went to the Institute for the first time? I barely remember doing anything there but sleeping, but I was gone for three days.” She didn’t expect him to snort, but he did.

“They didn’t replace you, Sunshine. I know you so good they’d never be able to fool me,” he promised. She didn’t move, because on one hand he’d been fooled before. His brother was gone. On the other hand, he’d sort of… known that, even if he was in denial about it. “Besides, that asshole couldn’t understand you well enough to replace you. You’re all kinds of good and he was dead behind the eyes— you can’t program someone with feelings you don’t understand. Not good enough to trick your real family,” he offered. _“If_ you’re a synth, then you’ve been one since the Vault.”

That was sort of comforting.

. . . . .

Audrey had a Captain’s Blend clenched between her knees because there was no room for proper tables in Longfellow’s cabin, and Shaun was asleep in the larger loft they’d built. She wanted a whiskey, but didn’t want Cait to have to be the only sober one— shit, even Deacon seemed a little drunk, but he could have been pretending to try and lighten the mood.

“Pros and cons of Audrey being a synth— _pro,_ you’re pretty much immortal,” he said, pointing at her from around his beer. Honestly, Deacon trying to cheer her up about being a synth was all the confirmation that she needed. After all, she’d been siphoning data from the Institute for _months_ before they blew it up. Tom had to have records, and it wasn’t like the project of recreating the Director’s mother was just going to go unremarked. She just… wondered how long Deacon had known. If he’d been keeping it from her for some reason.

“Con, none of _you_ are,” she scolded.

“Hancock is.”

“Only _sort of.”_

“Still,” Hancock said with a shrug. “You were worried about me and the kid— we had that serum from the Cabots, but now they can use that.”

“Until it runs out.”

“What, like you’re not gunna reverse-engineer it within a hundred years?” Cait asked with a snort. Audrey shrugged, because she didn’t know shit about medicine or chems— Hancock did, but she’d never really seen him go full throttle into cooking. “Look love, I’ve seen you jury rig a turret out of shite we found _literally_ in a dumpster. Between you and Hancock, you’ll figure it out.”

“One big immortal family.” Deacon agreed. _“Pro,_ now Shaun isn’t our only synth.”

“There’s Danse,” Cait reminded him.

“Who’s Danse?” It was easy to forget that Longfellow was just the newest addition to the club.

“Big Brotherhood of Steel guy— used to be, before they kicked him out for being a synth,” Hancock explained. “And he’s weird around kids and isn’t exactly on speaking terms with Drey right now, so he doesn’t count.”

“ _Con,”_ Audrey announced. “My creepy ass son built me out of some weird desire to meet his dead mother.” They just skimmed over that like it wasn’t even there, like she wasn’t some weird pseudo-Oedipal monster. He would have had to see her naked at least once— she’d been in Robotics, she knew how it worked. She knew that she was a damn fine mimic under her clothes.

“Pro, he wasn’t your son. A really fucking weird guy, but otherwise not related to you at all,” Deacon offered. That was… fair.

“Con, how many of those weird scientists saw me all… vulnerable.” She shifted, because it wasn’t just the almost definite invasion of privacy, but the fact that… they’d all seen her helpless with no idea who she was or how she got there. Just confused and afraid. Had they been spying on her?

“Pro, a lot of them got blown to smithereens,” Cait said with a grin and an explosion gesture with her hands. “So unless they made some sorta digital scrapbook, you’re fine.”

“Pro,” Longfellow offered, “they didn’t make you weird.” Cait snorted and the old man waved his hand sort of… unsteadily. Audrey had been worried that the drinking would bother Cait, but the fighter had just wrinkled her nose. _What’s it to me if some old fuck wants to pickle himself?_ The old fuck in question had found _that_ delightful. “Well I mean look, this was clearly a group of weirdo jellyfishes without the sense to come in from the rain. They coulda pre-programmed you with all sorts of gobbledygook, but you got away straight shootin’ with all your faculties. You gotta at least figure that they would have preferred to scrap you and start over, but you got the one up on ‘em all right and now as far as free will goes, you’re just as much your own person as any other waster.”

They were quiet for a while, then Deacon clapped his hands together. “That was _precious,”_ he declared, and Longfellow rolled his eyes.

“See now whoever built this one threw the damn instructions away.” Audrey wondered how he conceptualized the idea of building something with a set of instructions. There hadn’t been prepackaged furniture for two hundred years, and right at that moment it occurred to her that she hadn’t been there for that. For all she could remember about 2077— the house, the TV, the cars, the prepackaged furniture and whole, untouched cities— it wasn’t hers.

“Pro,” she said cautiously, putting up her hands when they all turned to her. They were excited. It was her first pro, after all. “That means the wasteland is my home. I mean, before I was just… it felt weird to just get plopped here and told to live, and I kind of felt like an outsider. Had all the pre-war shit in my head that wasn’t worth dick, but now… I mean. Knowing that this is all I’ve ever really experienced, that would make it kind of… my home.” That was sappy. It was stupid and sappy and Hancock had his arm around her and…

“Con, we can’t modify you on that robot build-y thing Ada taught you to make,” Deacon quipped.

“I mean, that was true either way,” Hancock reminded him, scooting his chair closer to Audrey’s because it was hard to hang on to her with space in between them. He still loved her. Deacon still loved her. Cait still loved her. Longfellow still did that weird shuffling sort of respect dance around her— that would need time, but she had time now _(pro)._

“Fuck that, we haven’t even tried. Fuckin’ quitters.” Cait shook her head and Audrey hung on to _home._ Maybe there was no Nate (which still hurt). Maybe there was no human Shaun (which hurt a lot less). But she still had a home, and that was… something all right.

**Author's Note:**

> YOU HAVE N O I D E A HOW PLEASED I WAS WHEN DIMA ASKED IF SOLE WAS A SYNTH !! I'd actually had this discussion with a friend early on after fo4's release, that I wanted the option to be able to say that the Sole Survivor was a synth. And It's plausible I mean Shaun made a kid synth of himself for Reasons. Why wouldn't he make a Synth of his mother? And putting it in charge of the Institute-- hell he was self-absorbed enough to think that he had some sort of fuckin leadership gene, and by putting her out in the Wasteland and waiting to see if she lived? Well that would prove that his genes managed to transcend species. He was super scientist that managed to recreate superior life.
> 
> I always wanted Audrey to be a synth tbh, and I was so glad they just slipped that in there. [My writing blog is here](http://nebulaad.tumblr.com) in case you want more nonsense on your Tumblr dash.


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